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Women & the Draft

Lydia McGrew points out that now that the US Military is set to open all its combat roles to women, it is only a matter of time before young women are required to register for the draft. She wonders whether, or how, a woman who objects to military service for those of her sex might establish an efficacious objection of conscience to her own military service. The prospects are not encouraging.

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23 thoughts on “Women & the Draft”

If the penalties of not registering for the draft are to assume the same lifestyle that women lived for millenia, (no driving, voting, etc…) is this not a backdoor signal for women to put down their arms and return to patriarchy?

Here’s the real question: as a father, what would you do to prevent your daughter from being forced to serve in combat. What would you _not_ do? And the real question: what do your answers say about the legitimacy of the current regime?

I’ve been playing around with a more radical idea. Could we work out some arrangement in which we Christians could renounce our citizenship and become resident aliens? Something where we would lose the right to vote, hold office, and some other things like that but also be exempt from military service. I would love a solution with such symbolic weight; it would bring our legal position in line with how we really see ourselves. We live here, we pay taxes, and we obey laws when they don’t directly command wickedness, but this is not our country. We are not Americans. We hate the United States of America. We regard its founding ideology as perverse, its government as illegitimate, and its culture as noxious. America’s actions are not our actions; its friends are not our friends; its enemies are not our enemies.

“We regard its founding ideology as perverse,”
And why?
Belloc regarded the political theory of the French Revolution as true and not contrary to Catholicism. Then how and why the theory and ideology of the American Revolution should be regarded as ‘perverse’?

PS Can one be a stateless individual?. If you renounce American citizenship, don’t you have to take up some other citizenship?

This is a strange response. Belloc is one person, out of a large body of thinkers we admire whose opinions sway decidedly against the French Revolution. Why should we prioritize his attitudes over those of, say, the Counterrevolutionaries who actually lived through that time and saw its manifold evils first-hand?

Immigrant male aliens are also required to register for the draft, on the same penalties as citizens. So renouncing citizenship would make no difference at all, on the assumption that the model for registering women for the draft wd. be the same as that for registering men, which I assume wd. be the case.

The U.S. military has largely been an arm of the welfare state for at least the last 30 years, so this is hardly surprising. Objections to the effect that women in combat will harm military readiness are probably technically correct but miss the point. Promoting military reaidness isn’t what the left is interested in here. What they want is to extend government benefits (e.g., hazard pay) to a segment of the population that doesn’t currently get them, at least not the same extent men do, and to provide employment for the otherwise-unemployable, which includes both low-IQ proletarians and second-sigma types with their government-subsidized bachelor’s degrees in diversity studies from Northwestern Nevada State Teachers’ College.

Remember, more people in the military = more people employed, so the leftist bureaucracy gets to claim it wins. More people in the military also = more pressure to justify the expense of military spending by invading increasingly insignificant nations posing increasingly illusory threats, so the left wins again. “Conservatives” get their hard-on from increased military spending, so they get to claim a win, too. Muslims and probably some day Russians (might) lose out, but who gives a crap about them, right?

By the way, while I do agree with the assessment that this harms military readiness (though not by much, at least not by much more than the already-existing sexualizaiton of the military, ludicrous and constantly shifting rules of engagement, etc., already have), objectively, that’s probably a good thing. Since America is the single most powerful force for evil in the world, and this evil is mediated in part by American military force, whatever weakens the American military will, ipso facto, lessen our capacity to aggressively export evil. Will someone like Putin be more afraid, less afraid, or equally as afraid of America now as before? We all know the answer.

I can’t help but be reminded of the communist left circa 1930 or so, who also despaired of having their vision of society realized here in the crassly materialistic US and looked to Russia as some kind of paradise where people took their ideas seriously.

And as the right used to say to them: if you like Russia so much, why not move there?

I would say we prefer that the United States not assimilate every single human being in every single society to liberalism (and, yes, that is our clearly announced program). Whether any particular instantiation of illiberalism is better or worse than any particular instantiation of liberalism is beside the point.

It is worthy of note, however, that many of the things that Americans usually criticize Russia for are precisely the things that we like about her. So, I can see how it would look like we prefer Russia to the US.

Promoting military reaidness isn’t what the left is interested in here. What they want is to extend government benefits (e.g., hazard pay) to a segment of the population that doesn’t currently get them,

That’s not the point of women in combat. Women can already join the military and get all the veteran’s benefits that a man can get.

“Women in combat” is about ensuring promotion opportunities for ambitious careerist female officers.

Not so much. Soldierettes and sailorettes are infamous for “accidentally” getting pregnant before being sent on an unpleasant deployment. As a result of being in a single-mother way, they get reassigned, while the men have to pick up the slack. This is bad for morale, of course: just when G.I. Joe was looking forward to some time with his family, he gets sent off for another six months in the sandbox or on a ship.

The soldierette/sailorette then finds herself miraculously un-pregnant through abortion—and in a comfy stateside position. Wreaks havoc on readiness, personnel assignment policies, etc. But at least she can be a conduit for VD!

We can say what the liberals can never think: women have no place in the military whatsoever.

I have a hard time envisioning women being drafted in the future. Isn’t liberalism all about satisfying individual preferences equally for all? Therefore, the only women who will be in the military are those who want to be in the military. Those who don’t want to be in the military won’t be required to be in the military. I think it more likely that the draft would be abolished altogether, which would be more consistent with liberalism’s fundamental commitments.